Biography

I originally did BA in Chinese and Russian at Leeds University, but came to SOAS in 1994 and have never left. I did an MA in Phonetics here, and soon learnt that SOAS is the best place to be for anyone with an interest in languages beyond European borders.

I decided to concentrate on experimental and acoustic phonetics while studying for the MA, but at the same time started learning Burmese. The phonetics of Mon-Khmer language Wa was the subject of my PhD research, and I spent time in Yunnan and in Burma doing fieldwork for my dissertation. I have been visiting Burma regularly since 1997.

I first became Lecturer in Burmese at SOAS in 1999, and currently teach a range of courses in Burmese, Khmer and Phonetics. My current research interests include the Wa Dictionary Project, and the phonetics and linguistics of Burmese and other South-East Asian languages, especially minority languages.

Most recently, I have become interested in the languages of the Deaf communities in Burma, who use a number of number of interrelated sign-languages, and hope very much to be able to do more research on sign languages in Burma and in South-East Asia in the future.

I welcome anyone interested in coming to SOAS to study any of these subjects, be it at BA, MA or PhD level, to get in touch to find out more.

Yingying Mu, Documentation of Pela and language contact between Pela and Zaiwa in lexical and syntactic borrowings

Recent PhD Students Supervised

Chris Button. 2009. A Reconstruction of Proto Northern Chin in Old Burmese and Old Chinese Perspective. "Button's original research on the languages of the Northern Chin group provides a precious body of data for the growing number of scholars working on unravelling the strands of genetic vs. contact relationship in this crucially important linguistic area of the world." - Prof J A Matisoff, examiner.

Helga So-Hartmann. A descriptive grammar of Daai Chin. 2008. Revised thesis published as Volume 7 in the STEDT Monograph Series. "This is the most detailed and sophisticated grammar of a Chin language to have appeared since Eugénie J.A. Henderson’s classic (1965) study of Tiddim (Northern Chin group). The Daai language is an important member of the Southern Chin group, with about 45,000 speakers."

Expertise

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